watercolors inspired by "winter" animals

A lovely young girl had her eighth birthday party here at the studio a couple of weekends ago.

She loves watercolors and wanted to do something with animals that live in the snow. In past workshops and camps, she has gravitated towards penguins so I wasn't that surprised she chose to do an animal theme picture and winter animals to boot!

I pulled out reference for polar bears and penguins. I then had a couple of request for arctic foxes and snow bunnies. All easy request for me to fulfill.

I taped down large sheets of watercolor paper and gave the party guest time to work out their sketches on practice paper before transferring them onto the watercolor paper.

We discussed finding the shapes of the animals to begin a sketch and also how they could make artist choices to simplify their compositions from what they saw on the reference and even a bit about abstracting their animals and what that actually meant.

They then traced over their drawings with sharpie pen.

I gave a quick demonstration on some of the techniques they could utilize with the watercolors, wet on wet, scratching, salt, and blooming.

I then handed out a palette of primary colors and black.

Before they started I shared with them how they didn't have to paint their animals realistic colors, they could paint "crazy" colors that evoked feelings, temperature or was just their favorite color.

The birthday girl was using a diving polar bear for reference and she created an amazing sketch but was unhappy with her upside down polar bear, as she wasn't quite sure she wanted the bear diving underwater. Together we discussed and brainstormed all the different reasons her polar bear could be upside down.

birthday girl

And here is what she came up with, pretty fabulous.

grade 3

grade 3

These two friends used the same snow bunny for reference but I love the how interesting the compare/contrast is between the two artworks. Although the sketches are very similar the artist choices made afterwards are unique to each child. From choosing different directions for their paper, background and how they painted their rabbits.

grade 2

This arctic fox created by the youngest party goer was fun to watch. At the start, she used her watercolor paint as regular paint and had put it on thickly on one side and declared she needed more. I challenged her to see if by adding water she could get that blue paint to cover the entire paper and she was quite surprised to see that she actually could do it. She was then lost in adding more colors to the blue, trying her hand at using the water to bloom the color and of course, had a lot of fun adding salt. Her fox was a very solid blue at the end when she told me she was finished and so I handed her a bit of paper towel and asked her to find the highlights on the reference and blot them out with the papertowel. Love her use of brushstrokes around the fox to lead the viewer into her artwork.

grade 3

The simplicity of this diving penguin is in my opinion genius. I love that the young artist was brave enough to leave out the facial features even and look at the way she used her brushstrokes in the water to created a downward motion with the penguin!

grade 3

And this happy, leaping polar bear painted in pink! How sweet. Again we brainstormed a bit about what might be in the hand of that bear and she giggled at some of the ideas. No surprise this happy bear ended up holding a present while being created at a birthday party.

grade 3

grade3

And then there were these two penguins. I am so impressed at the restraint each used when using color and although these look simple, they took just as much time for the young artist to create.

At the end when it comes time to sign their names, I always give a little talk about making a mindful decision on how to add their names to the pictures. After spending an hour and half creating the pictures, we don't want the name that was written in less than thirty seconds to be the first thing the viewer notices in the artwork.  Children quickly catch onto this concept and I am always amazed at some of the creative ways they implement their names into the artwork afterwards.

Happy 8th Birthday Miss T!! Thank you for letting me share in your special day.

conceptual art inspired by Matt Browning and Michael Drebert

During the Contemporary Art themed camp week, I decided to share a couple of artist I discovered while leading school group tours through the Vancouver Art Gallery's Vancouver Special:Ambivalent Pleasures exhibition.

Surprisingly I discovered that children really responded to conceptual art where the idea is more important than the result and were fascinated by the artwork of Matt Browning's collapsable wood sculptures carved from one piece of wood!

Matt Browning. untitled 2014

You read that right, one piece of wood! The time and labor that went into these works was mind boggling and kids were duly impressed. Browning's idea of creating sculptures that took time resonated with a generation of children where everything is available to them instantly, including the ones in my art camp.

The other artist in this room at the exhibition the children were excited about was Michael Drebert. Again working with the idea of labor and time, he refurbished a boat he called Poppy, built some oars, and then rowed out to Flower Island each day for the summer. At the end, he painted a very large but simple graphic poppy symbol on paper in india ink to represent the task and journey.

I liked the idea of presenting a project that took time, even if it was just a week of time during the camp. But I also worried that the children would not respond well to the project as there would be no instant gratification. 

I decided to have them spend the week building rubber band balls. I love my own. I have been adding to it for the past 7 years every time I get a rubber band from the weekly neighborhood newspaper delivered to my door or on the vegetables I purchase at the grocer. It is now the size of a softball and my family knows not to mess with one of my most coveted possessions.

I shared my rubber band ball with the kids, discussed the artwork of Browning and Drebert, and introduced creating a conceptual artwork based on labor and time.

Beyond my wildest imagination I could not of anticipated how much the kids would enjoy building a rubber band ball. Several of them asked to take the project home at night in order to continue adding rubber bands to the ball.  I was thrilled and where I thought four bags of rubber bands would be more than enough before the kids lost interest in the project, I ended up buying another five bags and would of needed more had the week not ended.

They were not easy to start. I did not give the kids a wadded up piece of paper to begin wrapping with, these are made strictly from rubber bands. Where I worried kids would want to give up or get frustrated at the beginning as starting the balls was challenging or get bored with the repetitive task of adding endless rubber bands to build the ball was all for nothing. Of all the projects the children created, I believe these balls were what they left the studio with most excited and proud of that week.

After building these rubber band ball "sculptures" inspired by Matt Brownings' wood carvings, it was time to create a symbolic artwork of the labor inspired by Michael Drebert.

I put out india ink, brushes and quill pens. We discussed symbolic drawings and then I sat back and watched these young artist figure out a way to symbolically represent their rubber band balls they had worked so hard on all week.

7 year old

9 year old

A couple of children created strong, simple black line images in keeping with Drebert's work but others began to add their own details and twist.

10 year old

9 year old

Adding shadow, color

6 year old

and even action to their artwork!

7 year old

Do I think these artworks will end up framed in their bedrooms? no

Do I think the balls are displayed and coveted at home? yes

And do I think these young artist walked away having had fun discovering conceptual contemporary artist and exploring creating work where the idea was more important than the results? absolutely